WHAT DO YOU DO WITH A PROBLEM LIKE NOELLE?

Florida Governor Jeb Bush's tough stand against drugs suddenly isn't so
tough when it comes to his 24-year-old coke-addicted daughter, reports DOUG
SAUNDERS.

Is there a different standard of justice for the First Family? Apparently, yes

By DOUG SAUNDERS

The great paradox at the centre of America's ruling dynasty was ripped open
last month when a telephone rang at the Orlando police station. With this
one call, the libertine, individualistic side of Bush's America was forced
to stare in the face of its rigidly puritanical and moralistic alter ego.

The call was from the Center for Drug-Free Living, a residential
rehabilitation program for Floridians charged with drug offenses. "One of
the women here was caught buying crack cocaine tonight," the caller
complained. "And a lot of the women are upset because she's been caught
about five times. And we want something done because our children are here,
and they just keep letting it slip under the counter and carpet . . . They
said, you know, because it's basically Noelle Bush . . . She does this all
the time, and she gets out of it because she's the Governor's daughter."

And, the caller didn't need to add, the niece of the president of the
United States. Noelle Bush, 24, could not have picked a more significant
moment to get busted. Only hours later, the polls would open in Florida's
Democratic primaries, in which voters would decide which candidate would
challenge Ms. Bush's father in his re-election bid. Jeb Bush was due to
make a press appearance that morning, and he was effectively ambushed by
the drug scandal involving his daughter, who had been arrested for
possession in February.

How could Jeb Bush respond? A devoutly ideological religious conservative,
he had run for election in 1998 on an anti-drug platform, vowing to get
tough and put people in jail. He was a central figure in a morally
conservative movement, now headed by his father, whose central principle
was that the moral decisions of individuals -- especially those involving
sex and drugs -- deserved to be met with the harshest and least forgiving
consequences.

Now his principles were being tested. Ms. Bush is a deeply troubled woman
with a long history of heavy drug use; when she was picked up in February
with illegally prescribed Xanax (a tranquilizer popular with heavy cocaine
users), she had an empty and beaten-up look. Over the summer, she was
caught cheating on her rehabilitation, and spent three days in jail.

Ms. Bush had seemed poised to begin a successful life, after following the
old Bush family pattern of getting into youthful trouble. She had studied
art and graduated from a Tallahassee community college in 2000, but was
mostly known there as a party girl. Since 1995, according to state records,
she has received seven speeding tickets and been involved in three
automobile crashes.

In January, she had dropped out of Florida State University to begin a
promising job with a software firm. Then she was caught impersonating a
local doctor in an effort to calm her cocaine-related anxieties with Xanax.

After last month's relapse, Jeb Bush responded as most parents would. "This
is a private issue, as it relates to my daughter and myself and my wife,"
he told reporters. "The road to recovery is a rocky one for a lot of people
who have this kind of problem."

From any other father, these would sound like compassionate and
common-sense remarks. For Jeb Bush, the past few days have turned those
words into political dynamite, smashing his electoral lead in this
Republican-heavy state so he now teeters a few points from defeat. Why?
Because those words contradict the values that he, like his brother George,
had made part of his campaign: Drugs are not "a private issue." Drug users
do not get a second, or third or fourth, chance. Drugs are a criminal
matter, not a medical problem.

Ms. Bush has become a Republican policy experiment. "Unfortunately," her
lawyer, Peter Antonacci, said this week, "the policy debate of treatment
versus incarceration is being worked out with a famous person in the middle."

In the past few days, Floridians have been quick to notice that the Bush
family's own policies differ from those it imposes on its constituents.
"Noelle Bush and her parents, in their private capacity, have been let down
by a system that Governor Bush, in his official capacity, also has let
down," wrote Jac Wilder VerSteeg, a conservative writer with the Palm Beach
Post.

By this, he was referring to Jeb Bush's cutting of funds to the very rehab
program his daughter is attending, and to the Governor's aggressive
boosting of tough-on-crime programs that sent more drug offenders to jail,
rather than to treatment. Democrats and their supporters leapt on the
Governor, accusing him of hypocrisy. Arianna Huffington, a national
columnist, wrote of "Jeb's wildly inconsistent attitude on the issue --
treatment and privacy for his daughter, incarceration and public
humiliation for everyone else."

The Los Angeles political writer Jake Tapper provided the ultimate Democrat
gloat, comparing the Bush dynasty to the Democrats' own messed-up first
family: "It's these Bushes with whom the current crop of Kennedys must be
compared."

When he first ran for office four years ago, Jeb Bush made it known that he
was the most right-wing and inflexible of the Bush men, a strict
conservative who would not give in. "I won't bend on my principles," he
said. "Those principles come from moral beliefs. I'm not going up there to
get along. I'm going there to shake things up."

Now, thanks to Ms. Bush, Jeb Bush has found himself having to bend on his
principles, to question his moral beliefs, to get along. In the midst of a
tight election campaign, this has proven perilous.

America's fundamental contradiction -- a deep intolerance of vice, combined
with an obsession with vice like no other country -- had found its center
in the ruling family. George W. Bush had managed to steer around this
contradiction by converting to born-again Christianity in the 1980s,
placing a wall of piety between his dissolute, booze-and-drugs years and
his rigid politics. George's daughters, Barbara and Jenna, did not escape
notice for their serial underage drinking. George's brother Neil drew
little fire last week when he divorced his wife of 22 years (a no-no in
many Republican circles). But Ms. Bush's indiscretions struck too close to
basic Republican values to go unremarked.

She is exactly the sort of drug user whom the Republicans have targeted. In
1980, 40,000 Americans were imprisoned for drug possession; by 1999, as a
result of the new laws of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., that number
had jumped to 453,000.

Indeed, the George W. Bush administration has tried to demonize drug users,
putting anti-drug advertisements on prime-time TV after Sept. 11 that made
the preposterous claim that Americans who buy drugs are helping finance al
Qaeda's terror attacks. Jeb Bush has not been asked whether he believes his
daughter has lent support to terrorism.

When the President's brother ran for governor in 1998, he talked endlessly
and aggressively about drugs. "The drug problem is a quiet poison in our
communities," he said in one debate, shortly before promising to triple
anti-drug spending and to appoint a retired U.S. army colonel to the
position of Florida drug czar. "We need to use the laws of the state and
toughen them up so then when drug traffickers sell drugs and poison our
young people, they're put in prison for a long time."

After that debate, Jeb Bush answered a few questions from reporters. What,
one asked, were his motives for the tough-on-drugs programs?

"Most of the joy I've ever had, and almost all of the trauma, is related to
being a father," he said, quietly. "And that is what this is all about."

At the time, most people took this to be an empty platitude, a bit of
campaign-trail sentimentality. This week, the people of Florida know what
trauma he was speaking of, and they know that its name is Noelle.

Doug Saunders writes on foreign affairs.
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